Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [123]
Other members of the nobility besides de Mun also served as deputies, but always as royalists in opposition. None took any share in the actual business of governing under the Republic. Among them was the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, representing the older nobility ante-dating the Empire, whose money came from Pommeroy champagne and Singer sewing machines and who, as president of the Jockey Club, was the acknowledged leader of the gratin, or “crust,” of French Society. Others were the Marquis de Breteuil, representing a district in the Hautes-Pyrénées, and his friend the Comte de Greffulhe, whose yellow beard and air of combined rage and majesty caused him to resemble the king in a pack of cards. Possessor of one of the largest fortunes in France and a wife who was the most beautiful woman in Society, he and she served as Marcel Proust’s models for the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes. Another deputy was Count Boni de Castellane, the dandy and arbiter of taste of his circle. Tall and slim, with pink skin, blue eyes and small neat golden moustache, he had married the dour American heiress Anna Gould, and with her dowry built a marble mansion furnished with precious antiques to exhibit the perfection that taste endowed by money could reach. At the party to celebrate its opening a footman in a scarlet cloak was stationed at the curve of the staircase, and when the Grand Duke Vladimir asked, “Who is that Cardinal over there?” the host replied, “Oh, he is only there to make an agreeable effect of color against the marble.” Count Boni’s assessment of the Affair was that the Jews “in their insensate desire to save a co-religionist” were arrogantly interfering with judicial process and simultaneously, or alternatively, were making Dreyfus “the pretext for a campaign against the Army which doubtless originated in Berlin.” In either case they were “insupportable to me.” This on the whole represented the view of the gratin, who in the words of a notable apostate among them, the Marquis de Galliffet, “continue to understand nothing.”
Some among them had literary or other distinctions. Comte Robert de Montesquiou, aesthete extraordinary, lavished on himself silks of lavender and gold, wrote elaborately symbolist poems and epitomized decadence to both Proust and Huysmans in their characters, the Baron de Charlus and des Esseintes. Montesquiou was what Oscar Wilde would have liked to have been if he had had more money, less talent and no humor. The Prince de Sagan, another notorious pederast who wore a perpetually fresh boutonniere and a perfectly waxed moustache, vied with his nephew, Count Boni, as the high priest of elegance and fought a duel with Abel Hermant, in whose satirical novels of the life of the rich and libertine he considered himself libelled. The Comtesse Anna de Noailles wrote poetry and glided through her lovely rooms in long white floating garments like “the ghost of something too beautiful to be real.” At her parties everything was required to focus on her. She did not trouble much about her guests, “merely smiled upon them when they arrived and softly sighed when she saw them going away.” The Comte de Vogüé, novelist and Academician, influenced the course of French literature by his studies of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevski which brought the great Russians to French attention.
These were the outstanding members. The bulk of the other one thousand or so who made up the gratin were chiefly distinguished, as one of them said, by “the certitude of a superiority that existed despite appearances to the contrary.” Comte Aimery de La Rochefoucauld was noted for “the almost fossil rigidity of his aristocratic prejudices.” Disgusted at improper protocol in a certain household, he said to a friend of his own level,